On Tuesday, Cloudflare, a major US company providing internet infrastructure services, experienced an unidentified issue causing error messages and outages for some of its customers’ websites. The problem, which began around 11:20 am London time, resulted in elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services and impacted sites like X and OpenAI. Cloudflare implemented a fix by 2:48 pm, though the cause of the unusual traffic spike remained unknown. This incident underscores the internet’s reliance on a limited number of key infrastructure providers, as described by experts such as Professor Alan Woodward.
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Several major online platforms, including X, Spotify, and ChatGPT, experienced outages due to issues with Cloudflare’s internal services. These outages, first reported around 11 am, affected thousands of users and multiple websites, with some services briefly returning before encountering further problems. Cloudflare, a significant web infrastructure provider, identified the issue and was implementing a fix, stating that a fifth of all global websites use its services. Experts noted that these outages highlight a trend of reliance on a small number of cloud providers, which can lead to widespread disruption when these platforms experience issues.
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Russia Hit With Widespread Internet Outage Across Country
As an avid gamer, it’s not every day that I have cause to rejoice over a widespread internet outage. However, when I heard that Russia was hit with a massive disruption to their internet services, I couldn’t help but crack a smile. It seems that the issue was related to a technical problem with the .ru domain’s global Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), which is used to secure data exchanged in internet protocol networks.
Now, I’m not an expert in technology, so I can’t say for certain whether this was a result of a hack or just a failure in maintenance, hardware, or software.… Continue reading